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Ask most people to name their favorite science fiction films, and many of the answers you’ll get aren’t really science fiction. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, USA/Hong Kong/UK 1982) is film noir set in the future. Alien (Ridley Scott, USA/UK 1979) is a horror film set in space. Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, USA/UK 2013) is a chase film set in space. Even Star Wars (George Lucas, USA 1977) is really a traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy film set in space. Science fiction is one of the most misunderstood phrases in all of film. Science fiction has to be about real or imagined technology, and the problems and results of that technology have to be central to the film.

The Martian, on the other hand, is a real science fiction film. What is it about? The difficulties of getting a man back home after he is left on mars following a manned mission that is cut short. It doesn’t have a deeper point to make (to its detriment) and it doesn’t use Mars as a backdrop to make a film that has little to do with its setting. It really is two and a half hours of watching to see how he survives long enough for NASA to get him back to earth. Continue reading →

Today is the 76th anniversary of when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater performed War of the Worlds on CBS radio, touching off some level of panic (though likely not as much as is often reported) and providing the greatest piece of radio drama in history. I listen to it every year, and even in the digital age Welles’s radio drama remains compelling.

However, to most, this date is more importantly Hallowe’en, a day celebrated with grizzly costumes and horror films. Since the current film landscape is quite barren (for those of us who cannot yet see Birdman anyway), I thought I would do something terribly trite and write a list of the greatest horror films I have ever seen. Note that, like any list that I make, it’s going to be English-language and modern-centric, because I am after all an American under 30 and so I tend to have seen more English-language and more recent films. However, I am not intentionally so limiting the films.

To be technical, the horror genre is essentially defined as a monster movie. But that is most definitely not how it is used in common vernacular. I’m trying to be closer to the common usage, basing it on the IMDb’s classifications but not following them blindly.

Zombies have become an incredibly overused monster in modern media, be it video games, films, or even novels. And part of the problem is that these newer entries into the zombie canon never seem to realize what George Romero knew from the start: the zombies themselves are not the point. The people are the point. The zombies themselves are just a MacGuffin. Romero’s film about racial intolerance sets the stage for what zombie fiction can do when done right, which he continued to do through most of the film’s sequels. It’s just unfortunate that now the concept of zombies has overwhelmed everything he said about racism, consumerism (Dawn of the Dead), militarism (Day of the Dead), or the media (Diary of the Dead). His films stand out as a powerful outlier to a terribly disappointing genre, but his original still works far better than logic would suggest.

This film modernized the monster movie in a way that even Jaws had not, because this monsters was bigger, more powerful, indefatigable, and seemingly immortal. And it was a monster that wasn’t here to enforce traditional economics–it was here to enforce traditional morals. It feels trite now because of the copycatting, but there is a reason that so many films since have repeated its pattern: Carpenter’s film is nothing short of brilliant. It’s a masterclass on cinematic composition that understands how to make violence most effective: build to it.

It doesn’t have a plot. It doesn’t have a point. But god does it have an incredible atmosphere and the absolute scariest visuals in history. If you have questioned Bergman’s status as a cinematic genius (I don’t know why anyone would, but in case), this film will show you why he has it: he did himself no favors as a writer, but this is the scariest film I’ve ever seen, because the former playwright has that great of an eye.

The Birds is all about tension. Much like The War of the Worlds that I mentioned in the introduction, its best moments are often moments of quiet dread and terror. Where The War of the Worlds has “Is anybody out there?,” this film has that silent drive into oblivion as its defining moment as an ode to mankind’s greatest fear: being alone. Interestingly, it’s a far less formalistic, manipulative film than much of Hitchcock’s work. It lets the audience create its own terror, and it works.

For some bizarre reason, when this film shows up on these lists, people try to insist it’s not a horror film. Not only is it a horror film, but Jaws is about as traditional a horror film as you can find. It gives us a monster, characters who are clear allegories for particular aspects of society (Brody is the government, Hooper is science, and Quint is the working class), and a clear (and conservative) political message. It even uses its monster in much the same way George Romero has always used his zombies: as a method to isolate the lead characters because the story is ultimately about them and not the monsters. And it does all of this very skillfully. Spielberg does very little to indulge his typical predilection for turning all of his films into allegories for divorce, and the result is a wonderful, tightly-focused film about the perceived dangers of immigration.

If The Birds is about silence, Psycho is a testament to how powerful a score can be. Bernard Herrman’s incredible score has as much power and tension as just about any film, and–unpopular opinion alert–Hitchcock knows what he’s doing behind the camera. The simplicity of The Birds can be contrasted with Psycho, a film that never leaves “well enough” alone–it’s full of bizarre angles, manipulative cutting, strikingly unnatural lighting, and every other trick that could possibly be in a filmmaker’s bag. In addition, Anthony Perkins gives one of the finest performances in film history, giving a shockingly deep and sensitive portrayal of a decidedly disturbed and monstrous man. The film also stands as a monument against Robert Redford’s famous statement that the last 15 minutes are the most important of any film: the last 10-15 minutes or so really should have ended up on the cutting room floor–they’re present as a result of a pretentious writer wanting to show off his “edgy” intelligence by talking about hermaphroditism in then-current psychological language. However, the film is just so damn good before then that it just doesn’t matter.

If any film has ever been as visually terrifying as Vargtimmen, it’s Lost Highway. And Lynch actually has a story to tell. He tells it in such a bizarre, Lynchian manner that it’s difficult to tell that it is a coherent story, but Lost Highway does make sense. It’s a film essentially set entirely in the mind of an insane person as he deals with his own confusion, anger, and guilt over murdering his wife, but you could be forgiven for not being able to tell–it’s that bizarre a narrative. I have said before that the later Mulholland Dr. (France/USA 2001) was essentially “Lost Highway for dummies” and while that’s something of an exaggeration, I don’t think it’s invalid–everything that’s good about Mulholland Dr. (except for Naomi Watts, who is absolutely and utterly brilliant in the later film while no one is even good in the earlier one)—is even better in Lost Highway.

Never has a descent into hell felt so . . . hellish. It’s a film that has a lot in common in Mulholland Dr., but it keeps its focus better and isn’t quite so caught up in its own narrative cleverness. The Coens at their best are special, and this is them at their best.

Stephen King famously complained that the atheist Kubrick couldn’t make a horror film, and this one was a failure because it was made by someone who “thought too much and felt too little.” If reading The Shining hadn’t already made me think King didn’t really know anything about his own genre, that statement would have (in spite of how great his giant bug statement is). Kubrick’s film is loaded with layer upon layer of complexity, with its intricate details working together to make a film about letting go of the past. The message of the film is appropriately simple–don’t hold on to the past too much lest you be consumed by it–and Kubrick focuses all of his energy on making that point, making his film an achievement that few have matched.

When Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac published their novel Celle qui n’était plus in 1952, they received interest from a certain British-American filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately for Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, a man he would consider his greatest rival until Clouzot’s ill health forced him into only sporadic work, beat him to the punch. Supposedly, Hitchcock’s call arrived within hours of the agreement with Clouzot. Hitchcock and the authors were so enthralled with one another that they would later write D’entre les morts specially for Hitchcock, and he would use it as the basis for his film Vertigo (USA 1958).

And it’s easy to see what Hitchcock was so interested in–it’s a twisting, turning script that begins with a brooding melancholy that turns into a nightmarish tension and never lets up. That it ends with one of the great endings in the history of cinema is only a small part of the puzzle: this film is a masterpiece.

Max Brooks’s novel World War Z is surely the most successful zombie apocalypse novel in history, earning praise for its ability to transform inherently silly subject matter into something not only meaningful but even affecting. It achieved its success through Brooks’s keen understanding of the fact that a zombie apocalypse is essentially a narrative device to allow for in-depth social commentary and metaphor, not a great or interesting story unto itself. It’s the same understanding that makes George Romero’s zombie films so much better than Tom Savini’s and Zack Snyder’s remakes. Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, Italy/USA 1978) is a film about consumerism and its supposed anti-intellectual effects, not how zombies could take over the world.

Unfortunately, Marc Forster and his trio of screenwriters (Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, and Damon Lindelof) don’t seem to share that understanding. Instead of delivering a film about the effects of consumerism on the minds of modern humans, the dangerous effects of racism and general fear of the “other,” or the dangers of increasing militarism in the modern political age (all of which have been the point of successful zombie films in the past), they present a zombie film that is nothing more or less than a medical thriller. It’s Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA/United Arab Emirates 2011) remade by someone who didn’t understand any of what made that such an excellent film. There is absolutely no unifying point to the film. It makes some pretenses of having them, repeatedly bringing up the idea that a powerful force’s greatest strength is also often its greatest weakness and focusing heavily on the hero’s love of his wife and children.

The film sets the tone for what it is immediately, opening with some simple family scenes that hamfistedly make the point that our hero, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), is used to working in dangerous situations and has given up such work for the sake of his family. Then, we get a mysterious traffic jam with equally mysterious police presence and explosions that ends up turning into the first great zombie attack, ending with Lane driving his family away in an amazing display of driving skill. He is quickly established as a perfect human being, reminiscent of Tom Cruise’s character in War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, USA 2005), and this sequence immediately sets up the film as a simplistic, one-note action film that’s more about fire, explosions, and fast driving cars than anything else. It establishes that the film is going to spell out everything it wants to say as obviously as possible and will not have anything deeper to say than its surface story. And the rest of the film remains the same.

Visually, Forster and cinematographer Ben Seresin do very little to add to the film. Forster having done some interesting visual work in his past in Finding Neverland (USA/UK 2004) and Stay (USA 2005), it’s terribly disappointing to see him fall into such clear clichés. It’s shot mostly in a cool color palette like most science fiction films and thrillers with all the usual overuse of CGI and series of extremely quick shots that add nothing to the film except to make its pace appear quicker than the plot itself actually moves forward. Forster has previously loved playing with bright shafts of light, interesting color choices, using small amounts of CGI in nontraditional ways, and using mirrors heavily, but none of those elements is visible in this film. Instead, he shoots a standard-issue Hollywood blockbuster, and as a result the film is a failure in a visual sense, something I never would have expected to say about one of Marc Forster’s works.

Acting-wise, there is little that can be said about the film, because there really isn’t anything for anyone to do. The only character who gets a lot of screen time is Gerry Lane, but he is depicted as such a perfect human being that there really is nothing for Brad Pitt to do with the role. He acquits himself well enough with what he has to do, but it’s essentially nothing. And that description could easily be applied to very actor in this film. Mireille Enos is just a scared, put-upon wife and mother; Daniella Kertesz is a just a brave, tough soldier; David Morse is just a loon; and so on. No one does a poor job, but no one has enough to do to stand out in a positive way. It was nice to get a peek at the twelfth Doctor ahead of time for a crazy Doctor Who fan like me, but he didn’t have enough time on screen to do anything even if the character did have any depth.

Overall, this film is essentially the most by-the-numbers zombie film one could ever imagine. It’s competent, sure, but it’s nothing else, and that makes the zombies as dull and silly as possible. It’s a waste of source material, but that’s all this film is.